If the 20th century was the Age of Anxiety, as dubbed by British poet WH AUDEN, then the 21st century could be dubbed the Age of Anxious Change—and who knows better about change than a frog? I mean beginning life as an egg, and then morphing into an odd, sperm-like pollywog and then sprouting legs and micro-evolving into a tadpole and finally into a lovely, svelte…wet…and athletic (from all that amphibious swimming!) FROG!
Being an amphibian, a frog is cold-blooded (but warm-hearted, of course, one could say of their affectionate natures [see Kermit…Under ‘Muppets.’]) And boy did he sing in a swell way of the difficulties and opportunities of ‘bein’ green”.That’s a frog for you: challenges, perils, paradoxes and parties…every hop, skip and leap of the swimmin’ way.
Froggy Family’s First Frolic by Margot Fass (links: Amazon.com, IndieBound.com, and Facebook.com/Frogbooks [please like this page!] evolved from her mind of slime and lily pads and lotuses.
Margot’s fascination with frogs all started with a captured imagination in the Grand Canyon, where, acrophobic, clinging to trees 20 feet from the rim, and overwhelmed with the historic TIME of it all, she thought about doing fabric paintings combining Hebrew letters (about 5,000 years old), a scene related to the Grand Canyon (about 80 million years old), and some form of amphibian and/or reptilian life. Beit was the second of 3, and featured the frog (about 330 million years old).
Frogs inspired:
- 3 black and white collages, Beit, then 6 more collages. 8 oil paintings, some with fabric. (http://margotfass.com/gallery/ see there: Froggy Chorus Line).
- Margot to learn about frogs as eco-indicators, and Kerry Kriger, whose devotion and perseverance inspired
- Margot to write and illustrate a book about Frogs and
- Margot to ask husband Martin to write stories for 4 of the oil paintings
- by one of Martin’s stories of Leap Frog,
LEAP FROG: a lot of people to think of sex. Kerry Kriger called it ‘Amplexus’. Shame!
To Margot, it was just a game. (oh my!)
A very fine and friendly website about True Love in the life-cycle of a Frog-Beast can be found here: http://allaboutfrogs.org/weird/general/cycle.html